From Craigslist to FEI

When I bought Jade, one of the things I liked best about her was the following part of her sales video:

Basically Boyd Martin's next horse

I mean, sure I'm not "an eventer" anymore but I can appreciate a horse that can walk over a log like nbd. Besides, the idea of showing up everyone with a Friesian at a local show sounded good back then. Spoiler alert: insurance frowns on that and well, she gets hot and is WAY better at dressage. Nevertheless, we like to cross train our horses and while Jade won't be competing against HH Azur or Petite Flower anytime soon, it is fun to throw her into new things and let her figure it out. She's a super fun girl that's always game for trying new things (especially when it's me ignoring her right side stiffness or insisting on a shoulder in with actual bend and angulation). Plus she was stumbling all over the terrain when we were just walking at Pine Hill in July. Derp. So after not really riding her for a month, I couldn't bring myself to do hard core dressage on her so we slapped my Chiberta on her and had some fun in the covered at dusk. Besides, I'd tortured Sarah with jumping right before this so it only seemed fair that I do the same to myself. The following video is NOT edited because it makes me lol so so much ><

The part you don't see here is how many times we had to raise the jump before she would actual JUMP the thing. She can get some serious air trotting over thing y'all. Once she realized they weren't actual cavaletti and real things to hop over, she got pretty excited which lead to the above bouncing while she tried to bounce her way to a correct canter and then didn't give a flip and bounced us up the arena. Silly girl lol.

Also dressage core strength SERIOUS helps with jumping. I mean, we KNOW that but man, I felt great.